20110131

American Islamic Forum for Democracy ("A.I.F.D.") founder, Zuhdi Jasser, spoke with DemoCast about exposing global-caliphate movement, Muslim Brotherhood's crusade for dominating and radicalizing North American Muslims. He offers A.I.F.D. as an contra-balancing influence and seeks support from Muslim and non-Muslims.

Does the US fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the region if the Muslim Brotherhood is the power behind the throne of the next regime?

The problem is the character of the protesters is not liberal. 84% of Egyptians support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

What all of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.

Add to that Obama’s electoral concern about looking like he is on the right side of justice and we have a US policy that is wholly antithetical to US interests.

This presents a daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge for the US’s remaining authoritarian Arab allies. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until now restive publics have been fearful of opposing their leaders because the US supports them. Now that the US is abandoning its most important ally and siding with its worst enemies, the Hashemites and the Sauds don’t look so powerful to their Arab streets. The same can be said for the Kuwaiti leadership and the pro-American political forces in Iraq.

As for Israel, America’s behavior towards Egypt should put to rest the notion that Israel can make further territorial sacrifices in places like the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley in exchange for US security guarantees. US behavior today – and the across-the-board nature of American rejection of Mubarak – is as clear a sign as one can find that US guarantees are not credible.

20110127

On this week's special edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, CBN News sits down with bestselling author and investigative journalist Edwin Black to discuss his new book, The Farhud.

The book outlines the history of Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East, including the 1941 organized massacre of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad known as The Farhud, or "violent dispossession."

Watch as Mr. Black breaks down the larger Arab Muslim role in the Nazi Holocaust, which included an active alliance between the leader of the Palestinians and Adolf Hitler, and how this history still affects the Middle East today.

- by The Associated PressAmerican journalists and students find that the men charged with Pearl's murder did not commit the crime; Pakistan used perjured testimony.

The four men imprisoned for killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were not present during his beheading but were convicted of murder because Pakistani authorities knowingly relied on perjured testimony and ignored other leads, says a report released Thursday.

The results of the Pearl Project, an investigation carried out by a team of American journalists and students and spanning more than three years, raise troubling questions about Pakistan's dysfunctional criminal justice system and underscore the limits US officials face in relying on Pakistani authorities.

The four men convicted in the killing did help kidnap the American journalist, according to the investigation. But it says forensic evidence known as "vein-matching" bolsters the confession of al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, to having killed Pearl.

The report says at least 14 of 27 people involved in abducting and murdered Pearl in 2002 are thought to remain free. And the four who have been convicted could be released if their appeal is ever heard because of false and contradictory evidence used in their trial.

Pearl, 38, was abducted from this southern port city on Jan. 23, 2002, while researching a story on Islamist militancy after the Sept. 11 attacks. On Feb. 21, 2002, a video of Pearl's killing was delivered to U.S. officials in Pakistan. His remains were found in a shallow grave on Karachi's outskirts three months later.

Within months of Pearl's disappearance, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani heritage, and three accomplices were caught, charged, and convicted of murder and kidnapping. Sheikh, called the kidnapping's mastermind, was sentenced to death in July 2002. The three others were given life terms, which in Pakistan usually means 25 years.

Since then, the men's appeals have gone nowhere in the courts, despite dozens of hearings. Both the defense and the prosecution blame each other for stalling tactics. And there is constant speculation that Sheikh is being protected, possibly by Pakistani intelligence agencies.

Defense attorney Rai Basheer said the prosecution knows it would lose on appeal and is delaying the process, but prosecutor Raja Qureshi dismissed those claims.

"I challenge the defense to come and attend the case properly and consistently, and they will themselves know whose case is weak," Qureshi told The Associated Press.

The Pearl Project's findings appear to strengthen the defense's hand.

For instance, it finds significant discrepancies between Pakistani police reports and later court testimonies, including that of a taxi driver whose account was considered crucial to the conviction.

Authorities apparently cajoled the driver to change his earlier story and, while testifying, place Sheikh with Pearl near the restaurant where the journalist was picked up by his abductors, the report says. But Sheikh is believed to have left Karachi before other men he had recruited carried out the kidnapping.

At the same time they were building their case against Sheikh and the three others, investigators did not pursue leads provided by another suspect in custody. That man, Fazal Karim, allegedly was one of the guards holding Pearl hostage and was there during his slaying. Karim also led investigators to Pearl's grave.

But his account differed from the taxi driver's, thus threatening the prosecution's case against the four on trial. US officials pushed the Pakistanis to restart the trial to include all the evidence, but the prosecutor argued that doing so would give the defense a huge advantage. So Karim's account didn't make it to court, and he was later set free.

The murder case against the four convicts also appears weakened by Mohammed's suspected role.

The al-Qaida No. 3 claimed after his capture that he beheaded Pearl. Mohammed is being held at the Guantanamo Bay US military prison, and the confession is believed to have come during interrogation that included waterboarding.

But the Pearl Project reports that US investigators also used a technique called "vein-matching" to compare a photo of Mohammed's hand with a photo of a hand shown on the video of Pearl's killing, and that it's a fit.

Vein-matching is not considered as reliable as methods such as fingerprinting, but the CIA and FBI do use it at times to identify suspects, the report says. It involves "extracting the information of the vascular structure of a hand or finger and converting it into a mathematical quantity."

One of the more gruesome findings of the report is that the videotaping of Pearl's beheading was initially bungled, and that the killing had to be re-enacted. Mohammed had already slashed Pearl's neck when the cameraman had to restart the taping. The second time, Mohammed fully severed the head.

Two of Mohammed's nephews may have been present during the killing, according to the report, which cites U.S. and Pakistani officials. One nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is also at Guantanamo and is believed to have been the al-Qaida facilitator in Karachi for Richard Reid, the shoebomber who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001. Pearl was trying to research the Reid case and track down his facilitator when he was kidnapped.

The report notes that neither Mohammed nor the detained nephew is likely to be charged in Pearl's killing because that could complicate cases against them over the Sept. 11 attacks. The other nephew's whereabouts are unknown.

How exactly al-Qaida became involved in the Pearl plot remains a mystery. The report cites Mohammed's interviews with FBI agents, in which he said he was directed to Pearl by another al-Qaida leader,Saif al-Adel. It also says that Pearl's murder was "the first known operation in which Pakistani militants collaborated with al-Qaida."

In Pakistan, all parts of the justice system — police, prosecuting agencies, defense lawyers and judges — are riddled with corruption and ineptitude. The conviction rate hovers between 5 and 10 percent, according to a report in December by the International Crisis Group. That report also noted that outsiders, including spy agencies, use intimidation to compromise the justice system.

Conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan about the relationship Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had with Sheikh.

As Pakistani officials were searching for him in 2002, Sheikh turned himself in to a former ISI official, Ejaz Shah, at the urging of his father and his uncle.

Yet it wasn't until a week later, on February 12, that US officials learned that police had him, the report says. US authorities told the Pearl Project that they have no idea what happened with Sheikh during those seven "lost days."

"Whether Sheikh sought refuge in Shah's custody because there was a family connection and would, therefore, provide a soft landing into the legal system, or whether it was because Sheikh had a long history with the ISI is still unresolved," the Pearl Project's report states.

The Pearl Project's sponsors include Georgetown University and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a program at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. The lead writer of the report was journalist Asra Q. Nomani, with whom Pearl and his wife were staying in Karachi when he was kidnapped.

20110111

"Take back our narrative?" From who? Apologist liberal press? Academics? Obama Administration? Which dissenters will be there? Organized or independently?MSA West is an organization comprised of Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) representing campuses across the west coast, and is a council of MSA National. It will hold its annual convention Friday 14 Jan -Sunday 16 Jan at UCLA's Ackerman Hall. The MSA was started by activists involved with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA) has chapters at nearly 600 colleges and universities across North America. Treated by administrators and student governments alike as a respectable political organization, the MSA has, over the past few years, sponsored a series of vile expressions of Jew-hatred in a variety of campus and non-campus venues.

A few examples serve to illustrate the content of the MSA’s character:
In October 2000, the president of UCLA’s MSA led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of "Death to Israel!" and "Death to the Jews!"

At UCLA's annual "Anti-Zionist Week" festivities, rank-and-file MSA members have raised money for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, who are solemnly sworn to the mass murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel. (John Perazzo in FrontPage Magazine's

Big Peace published a serialization of Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy Report analyzing Shariah - The Threat to America"

The self-proclaimed goal of the Muslim Brotherhood in the USA (according to court-submitted evidence) is:

"The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions.

Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack."

In this Spring 2009 speech presented at University of California at Los Angeles, self-proclaimed ex-terrorist, Walid Shoebat, advocates for internal political reform of theocratized Moslem societies.

(Background for Mr. Shoebat's remarks are made during first 18 minutes. Please be patient with wireless microphone signal which strengthens after 18:30 minute point in 47 minute program. Thank you).

Know the Front Groups to Know the Networks

The Center for Security Policy's Team B report ("Shariah- The Threat to America") shows that the ties of such groups to the Muslim Brotherhood can nonetheless be readily established by the involvement in their founding and/or operations of individuals associated with other Ikhwan fronts.

In order to be considered by the Muslim Brotherhood to be one of “our organizations” or an “organization of our friends,” all of these entities had to have embraced the aforementioned Ikhwan creed: “Allah is our goal; the Messenger is our guide: the Koran is our law; Jihad is our means; and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our inspiration.”

As we have seen, the actualization of the Muslim Brotherhood creed demands the triumph of shariah globally and the re-establishing the caliphate on a global basis. This end-state will entail subordinating to shariah the governing system of non-Islamic nations like ours (and Muslim nations not currently adhering to Islamic law) and, in due course, the destruction of such alternatives.

Pre-violent Jihad

The inherently seditious nature of the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda and its incompatibility with Western civilization and governments is typically obscured in the Free World by the assertion that the Ikhwan only seeks to achieve its objectives through non-violent means. As a result, the Brothers, their allies and proxies are all-too-often considered to be acceptable and reliable partners for governments seeking to counter violent jihad.

Such openness to the Ikhwan is astounding not only because of the toxic nature of the MB’s ambitions.

It also ignores the fact that Brotherhood doctrine recognizes that violence must be used when needed to achieve shariah’s supremacist objectives. For example, the Brotherhood bylaws call for Muslims to “fight the tyrants” when necessary to establish the Islamic State, indicating violence is approved when the time is appropriate.

Even more dispositive is the fact that the U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, Hamas, was formed out of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, jihadi organizations such as al Qaeda sprang out of the Muslim Brotherhood and have among their leaders senior Muslim Brothers.

These realities underscore the inadvisability of any “outreach” to American Muslim organizations that espouse shariah, whether or not they acknowledge a tie to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As political theorist Barry Cooper argues in his book, New Political Religions, or, An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, the Islamists, like the Nazis and Communists, are motivated more by a "disease of the spirit" than materialist aspirations.

... They imagine Islam spreading across the globe and the establishment of a worldwide caliphate based on shariah law. They see themselves empowered by Allah to bring about this new world order by destroying a civilization they regard as spiritually empty. Thus, Islamism constitutes a political religion of apocalyptic proportions.

They ultimately seek the transformation of the West to accommodate Islam. Chandra Muzaffar, a widely respected Malaysian Islamic scholar, writing in a 2006 book, The New Voices of Islam, captures this spiritual aspiration: "Islam and the post-Enlightenment secular West are diametrically opposed to one another. Muslims will then realize that unless they transform the secular world of the West, that vision of justice embodied in the Koran will never become a reality."

The challenge for Islamists, obviously, is whether they can achieve that transformation better through demographic domination over the next few decades or through violence.

The challenge for Westerners, perhaps not so obviously, is whether they will awaken in time from their multicultural slumbers to protect their cultural heritage and avoid, possibly, a new dark age.

It will be interesting to observe the international response following last night’s slaughter of at least 21 Christians by Islamists outside a Church in Alexandria, Egypt. If it had been the other way around (heaven forfend that it had been carried out by Jews) there would have been mass protests around the world, condemnations from leading politicians and, given that this comes on the heels of other such massacres, could well have ended up with a resolution at the United Nations.

But don’t hold your breath. The politically correct multi-culturalism that holds sway across Europe and increasing sections of the United States (I hardly need mention the UN) dictates that we must always beware of enflaming Muslim sensitivities. The great diversionary spectre of “Islamophobia” silences all that go before it.

But last night’s bomb attack in Egypt is no isolated event. During a Christmas Day mass in the Philippines 11 were injured in a bombing in a Christian chapel. Also in December 38 Christians were slaughtered by Muslim extremists in Nigeria, a country where church burnings are starting to become commonplace. In Iraq last Autumn 68 Christians were massacred in the Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad by a group threatening that Christians will be “exterminated”. Across the Middle East, Christians increasingly live in fear of their Muslim neighbours, and the region’s Christian population is diminishing fast. So at what point does a series of “isolated events” start to form a pattern?

The best answer to that question is: at the point when you have opened your eyes sufficiently to see what is really going on. The pattern has been observable for many years now and it is something which proceeds directly from an Islamist ideology whose central precepts enjoy widespread support across the Islamic world.

It is precisely at this stage in the discussion that we should (but, due to multiculturalist pathologies, do not) bring in the question of Israel and the Jews. For what we are now seeing against Christians has been going on with regard to the Jews for decades. The genocidal anti-Semitism long rife across the Middle East (and long ignored by the media) forms part of a much bigger picture. In common with previous totalitarianisms, it may be Jews first, but there are plenty of others on the list of targets.

Jews, Christians and, indeed, liberal secularists are all on that list, and no amount of denial or appeasement will take them off it.

21 Christian families lost a loved one last night in Egypt. For them, no more tragic start to 2011 could be imagined. For the rest of us, we can either count our lucky stars, put it out of our minds, and move on, or we can mourn the dead, face the new reality, and pull together as one to fight it. So which is it to be?

On January 6 2010, just before the Christmas Eve Massacre in Nag Hammadi, security withdrew its forces from guarding the church a couple of hours before the shooting of the Coptic congregation took place.
Attorney Mamdouh Nakhla, Head of Al-Kalema Human Rights Center, wondered if state security is an accomplice or just too cowardly to confront the Islamists in Egypt who carried out the Church massacre.
"The crime is local and those who committed it are known, in addition there was a demonstration on the same day using the same rhetoric like al-Qaida. The Al Mujahedeen website threatens to repeat the attack in more churches. The site has addresses of churches and even how to make a bomb. Does security not know about it?"

"Anyone who says that it was a foreign or Israeli plot is trying to play down the crime and is trying to clear those murderers of this massacre, and I consider them their accomplices," said Nakhla.

Nakhla said that he was preparing a complaint to be presented to President Mubarak asking for the resignation of Interior Minister Habib el Adly for failing in his duty of protecting the Copts, and for not telling the truth by saying that it was a suicide attack by one individual, when everyone could see the detonated car, just to clear his security personnel of the responsibility of letting the Skoda park in front of the church. "This 100KG bomb could not have been transported by one individual as the Interior Minister wants us to believe."